HYPOTHESIS

Here is what we have come to understand while exploring the core components of digital
marketing that it is itself a communication source while containing various communication
mediums within that enable business to operate in the online world of the internet.

To build successful digital marketing campaigns here is what it takes in simplified steps.

1. CREATE CROSS-CHANNEL BRAND CONSISTENCY

Online visitors want a consistent, personalized, and on-brand experience regardless of
the channel one might be focusing on, so when designing your website’s landing page
it’s important to be mindful of your brand and messaging.

Think about creating consistency in colors, tag lines, fonts, features, and copy across
social media, landing pages, email marketing lists, and other communications.

Let’s take a look at a brand that I saw grow in local space, which is extraordinary for a
company which started just 3 years ago, from a single city operation.

I present to you 14th Street Pizza, Pioneer in New York style 20-inch. hand-tossed pizza!

This study will give you a picture about how brand consistency is achieved through visual
design and how you can leverage that to strengthen relationships with your customers,
who might have different preferences when it comes to social media usage but still want
to be connected to the main personality of your brand.

WEBSITE

Your website is your store front or playing field, where you can hit home run if you
understand your customer well. When you’re starting out it is important to develop a
branding theme, which you should keep consistent on your website, social media,
packaging and even offline marketing.

Below is a screenshot of 14th Street Pizza. You’ll see further down the post how it aligns
with the design consistency on social media channels they’re active on.
FACEBOOK

14th Street Pizza has been known to come up with unique and different campaigns over
the course of two years. The brand is going very well and is known for its active social
presence and has amassed more than 1.1 million fans.

We can see that they’re using the same graphic elements through their feed with high
engagement.

TWITTER

Twitter is the second most popular social media channel. The consistency can be see here
as well, and it provides an excellent experience.
INSTAGRAM

Brand consistency does not mean a common profile picture or a common message but it’s
simply something that tells people they are communicating with the same brand across
different social channels.
Check out how they go about launching campaigns across different social channels. The
key takeaway is that you don’t necessarily have to invest heavily into product
photography or graphic design; however, it is necessary to have a common font, color
scheme, and minimal design that you can carry across different channels.

2. CONVERT TO RESPONSIVE DESIGN

The year 2013 is named as “The Year of Responsive Design” (means handheld-device
friendly websites) and Google recommends responsive design — we see why it is
important as more users than ever are using tablets and mobile phones to browse the
Internet, so it’s critical that your website and its landing pages can adapt to this trend.
Why should you care about responsive design? Simply because it increases conversions.
Online studies show that 29% of smartphone owners have used their device for online
shopping and the number will increase as more retailers convert their website to a
responsive design, which will offer better user experience.

Top performing landing pages are going to need to be responsive to what device a user
is coming from to ensure the best possible user experience as well as a better conversion
rate.

TWO MAIN REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER A RESPONSIVE DESIGN ARE:

1. Better User Experience

2. Increase in Conversions

USER EXPERIENCE

As I discussed earlier, it is extremely important for brands to have a consistent theme,

design, and message across different channels but it also applies to having consistency
for different devices. That is where responsive designs come into play as they provide a
better experience across different device sizes.

And while responsive design provides a better user experience, it is also has benefits for
business owners as they only have one website to build, manage, and optimize. They can
leverage the SEO Efforts for mobile users (as mobile searches are growing) and also
allows hassle-free content sharing as there is only one URL, compared to mobile sites
where content that is shared leads users to weird looking pages on a desktop.

INCREASE IN CONVERSIONS

A lot has been written about responsive web design, and one can go into the technical
side of it; however, at the end of the day, what matters are the conversions a website is
generating and from what we’ve seen, responsive web design and landing pages deliver
higher conversions.
3. EMBRACE PERSONALIZATION
Nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content
(e.g., offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their
interests. (Source: Janrain & Harris Interactive)

Big boys like Amazon, Netflix, and Pinterest (social media platform) aren’t the only
players in the personalization game anymore.

4. UNDERSTAND USER PSYCHOLOGY

We’re all about to become scientists and psychologists. As landing page design becomes
more intricate and competitive, website owners need to start looking more at the
psychology behind web users to design more effective landing pages.

From the colors, you choose for your call-to-actions (Buttons, menus, links etc.) to the copy
you write to persuade, it’s going to be all about using buyer psychology to create the best
possible experience. Before, most industries tended to work off rough data sets and
preconceived notions of who their visitors were.

5. PRACTICE EVOLUTIONARY DESIGN

Thought you only had to update your site’s overall design every 18 to 24 months? Think
again. Many site owners are now practicing evolutionary design, using data over periods
of 90 days to determine incremental changes that can be made to their site to improve
both conversion and user experience.

This turns traditional web design on its head, as in the past it used to be all about long
gaps before refreshing.

Instead, it’s about making small but impactful changes that users can grow with and
become used to gradually. This builds trust, recognition, and improves your site’s ability
to retain visitors and keep them coming back for more.

However, exercise caution: only make changes that make sense or that you
have data to support and don’t make the changes too often; otherwise, you risk
alienating users instead of engaging them.
SUMMARY

The use of the Internet and other digital media and technology to support ‘modern marketing’
has given rise to a bewildering range of labels and jargon created by both academics and
professionals. It has been called digital marketing, Internet marketing, e-marketing and web
marketing and these alternative terms have varied through time.

It is important to remember that just because digital marketing uses different communications
techniques to traditional marketing, its end objectives are no different from the objectives that
marketing has always had. It can be easy to set objectives for digital marketing based around
‘vanity metrics’ such as number of ‘likes’ or followers, so it is useful to bear in mind this definition
of marketing advanced by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:

"Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying
customer requirements profitably".

So, digital marketing is about utilizing digital technology to achieve marketing objectives. There is
no essential need for digital marketing to always be separate from the marketing department, as
the objectives of both are the same. However, for now it remains a useful term because digital
marketing requires a certain skill-set to utilize the digital technology effectively.

As recent Developing Digital Skills report showed, many marketers are now spending > 50%
of their time on digital marketing activities and two of the three top job roles in marketing are
digital, so clearly digital skills are needed.